Lotus Notes Replication is prior art circa 1985
on
AvantGo Gets a Patent
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· Score: 5, Informative
This patent looks to be worded broadly enough to cover Lotus Notes clientserver replication, which was developed around 1985. The only difference I can see is that Notes replication does not use XML or HTTP... obviously these were not available in 1985. I don't know if that's a material part of the patent claim.
I think Lotus has their own patents covering replication. I also know that some work was being done to leverage the Notes replication engine in the Internet world, (circa 1995) perhaps using HTTP or XML, but I can't prove this.
IBM, owner of Lotus and the world's largest patent holder, may have something to say about this patent.
Notes *can* index word documents (it can parse.doc files and index the text within). Simply reindex the database, this time setting the indexer to index attachment files. Your index size will grow, but it does work..
Today was a very scary and tragic day in New York City. I commute to work by taking the subway downtown to the World Trade Center, then transferring to another train to get across the Hudson River to New Jersey.
This morning I was on the train (late for work as usual) and I was surprised to find the subway stopped in a tunnel, then it bypassed the WTC stop. I got out at the next stop and went above ground, looked up and saw the WTC 1 tower on fire. When I heard that a plane had hit the building, my first thought was "terrorist attack", so I headed away from the building - southeast - to the corner of Broadway and Wall Street. There were hundreds of people in the street looking up at the WTC towers and trying to call home on their cell phones (which were overloaded and not working)
I queued up to use the pay phone, called home and my wife told me that it was a terrorist attack, the Pentagon had been hit as well, I'd better come home quickly.
I continued walking south on Broadway, and heard a noise like a jet plane passing close overhead, then a tremendous BOOM. Everyone in the street screamed and ran, we all thought it was a bombing. This may have been the 2nd plane hitting the second WTC tower. There was a tremendous cloud of smoke and ash filling the air, you could not see or breathe well. It looked like a war zone. Someone said that the towers had collapsed, I thought to myself "that can't be right. those towers can withstand anything." Everyone was running, trying to get the hell out of there.
I ducked into the subway station and tried to get a train uptown, but no trains were running. People were terrified. I thought about catching the Staten Island Ferry to get out of Manhattan, but I decided I'd rather be at home with my wife. I went above ground, started walking east - away from the financial district. Thousands of people were flooding the streets, walking towards Brooklyn and uptown. I spotted an empty cab (!) and got in, picked up another passenger and we managed to get through the crowds to the highway. I got home safely around noon.
We then started calling family and friends, including some of my friends that work in the WTC. Luckily, all of my friends are safe and accounted for. Life is going to go on but I think things are going to be very different in NYC for a long time.
Let's see a successfully mass-marketed x86 PC with Linux preinstalled (and I define "successfully" as "I can go to Best Buy or Circuit City and pick one up"), before we move ahead with a different system architecture...
With a few corporations owning majority control over the major-market radio stations in the US, they're all the same anyway. I can't tell the difference between a "classic rock" station in Boston, Chicago, or anywhere else.
Public radio and noncommercial radio are not affected; some of my favorites on the web:
Ray Ozzie started Groove in 1997, pre-Napster. Technology like this doesn't get written overnight. Saying that this is "cashing in" on the Napster P2P frenzy is ridiculous.
I'm currently building a multitier web application using Weblogic 5.1 as the application server - EJBs for the business logic and db persistence, and JSP for the presentation layer.
In terms of portability across app servers, most of your problems will be with deployment descriptors (the XML files) and entity bean finder methods. The representation of this data has not been standardized. EJB 2.0 spec will fix this.
I second the comments about entity bean to DB tables - it's difficult to express any but the simplest object-relational mappings. Again, EJB 2.0 promises to fix this and add a lot more, such as mapping Entity beans to arbitrary data sources (LDAP, anyone?)
I received a CueCat free in the mail as a subscriber to Forbes Magazine. If you install the Windows software, you have to go online and agree to an EULA before the software will function. The interesting bits of the EULA are as follows:
- You agree not to reverse engineer the CueCat software or hardware
- You agree that the CueCat is property of Digital Convergence Inc. and may be reposessed at any time.
(I'm paraphrasing the above.)
Now, let's say you never agreed to the EULA. How can you be bound by the above restrictions? I received the CueCat free in the mail WITHOUT ASKING for it.
Digital Convergence is probably banking on the driver developers to fold under pressure. And they may do just that. But I'd love to see them fight it in court.
I used to be a SCSI bigot but I could not justify the difference in price for desktop machines.
A typical example:
Quantum Fireball lct10 20.4GB EIDE, price $99
Quantum Atlas III 18.2GB Ultra Wide SCSI hard disk, price $269
Before someone pulls out the respective spec sheets for each drive and starts quoting MTBF numbers and data transfer rates, let's look at the big picture here:
The average user - heck, even the power user, is not going to see much of a difference between these drives in day-to-day use. Yet the SCSI drive is > 2.5x the price of the EIDE drive.
SCSI is a mature technology. Even EIDE drives use the SCSI command set over the EIDE bus. So WHY do we still see these huge price differences?
Decoding the.XML format only solves 10% of the problem, anyway.
As previous topic posters have noted, the.DOC format is well documented. But MS Word's behavior when interpreting.DOC files is NOT documented, and that's the problem. You have to be bug for bug compatible with their implementation of a complex, and somewhat loose, file specification.
On top of that, you have to implement Visual Basic macros and all the other fun stuff that makes MS Office so "wonderful."
We've got plenty of them already. StarOffice. Lotus SmartSuite. Corel Office. KOffice. Each has its backers.
But the network effect of standardization on the.doc,.xls,.ppt formats are so strong that most people would rather pay for guaranteed compatibility (and upgrade every 2 years), than use an alternate free product.
Until one can guarantee 100% bug-for-bug compatibility with MS Office - including templates, macro functionality, and UI, and keep up with Microsoft's gratuitous changes every few years, it's dommed to fail.
In my mind a better option would be to improve WINE - it can already run Microsoft Office applications well, and is not far from running them "perfectly." When that happens you will see a lot of folks moving to MS Office on the Linux desktop.
Assume that this could be a potential problem, and assume that a company wants to make sure they are using a "legit" distro. Now, what strategies are currently in place to prevent "rogue" Linux variants from being deployed?
Do RedHat/Debian/SuSe digitally sign their distros, and how easy is it to verify the authenticity of those signatures?
WINE will drive Linux' acceptance on the desktop in businesses and eventually, homes. It's come a long way - to the point where you can really use it to run commercial (Microsoft!) applications and get useful work done.They deserve the award.
For my money, New York City is a great place for geeks.
- DSL and Cable Modem access is widespread - Food, Laundry, DVD home delivery 24/7 - restaurants/clubs/etc/etc/etc/etc...
Only problem is, most of the jobs here are in the financial sector (ugh) or Silicon Alley, which values 'creative' types over technical wizards, but that may change as the technical job market expands.
I never liked the cheapie antenna on the Palm VII so I opted for the Handspring Pro instead. Now this looks like a sweet product.
By the way- heard about the new killer app for these things? There is supposed to be a price-comparison webclipping application - while in a store, just enter the product's UPC number and you'll get a list of competitive prices from other stores.
Microsoft will still be distributing their non-compliant Java Virtual Machine with every copy of MSIE and Windows 98 that goes out the door. So you still have the problem of no built-in support for RMI or JNI. Even if Rational changes J++ into a completely standards-compliant development tool, It's the JVM that matters.
support in Notes 4.x was done with a proprietary Win16 emulation layer (similar to WINELIB). I assume that when WINELIB matures it will be a simple matter to link Notes 5.x against WINELIB and build a Linux version.
Will Lotus do this? Only if there is sufficient demand from Linux users!
Disclaimer: I own a bunch of RHAT stock (purchased way above $14:( ) so take all this with a grain of salt...
Why does RHAT have such a huge valuation? Simple. The total future size of the Linux market is unknown (and therefore, from Wall Street's point of view, close to infinite) - thus justifying virtually any valuation you'd care to put on Red Hat.
We've seen this phenomenon before with Internet stocks. Who knows how big the market for fubar.com will be? So the stock goes through the roof!
But when a market gets some bounds around it, WATCH OUT. A company in a mature market where we have some sense of the ultimate market size will have much lower valuations.
I also own a PowerMac 7500 (great machine!) and I've upgraded it several times - first to a 120mhz 604 from Apple, now to a 233mhz G3 from Sonnet Technologies.
Never had a single glitch or compatibility problem with either upgrade. No problems with SCSI or noise. And I do serious work on this machine, five days a week.
Of course, Apple hasn't received a dime of income from me since I bought the 604 board, which is why Steve is anxious to get us oldtimers to upgrade:)
I've heard that the forthcoming MacOS X *client* OS will not run on the 7500, upgraded or otherwise. This alone may push me to a G4. Sigh...
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This patent looks to be worded broadly enough to cover Lotus Notes clientserver replication, which was developed around 1985. The only difference I can see is that Notes replication does not use XML or HTTP... obviously these were not available in 1985. I don't know if that's a material part of the patent claim.
I think Lotus has their own patents covering replication. I also know that some work was being done to leverage the Notes replication engine in the Internet world, (circa 1995) perhaps using HTTP or XML, but I can't prove this.
IBM, owner of Lotus and the world's largest patent holder, may have something to say about this patent.
Notes *can* index word documents (it can parse .doc files and index the text within). Simply reindex the database, this time setting the indexer to index attachment files. Your index size will grow, but it does work..
Today was a very scary and tragic day in New York City. I commute to work by taking the subway downtown to the World Trade Center, then transferring to another train to get across the Hudson River to New Jersey.
This morning I was on the train (late for work as usual) and I was surprised to find the subway stopped in a tunnel, then it bypassed the WTC stop. I got out at the next stop and went above ground, looked up and saw the WTC 1 tower on fire. When I heard that a plane had hit the building, my first thought was "terrorist attack", so I headed away from the building - southeast - to the corner of Broadway and Wall Street. There were hundreds of people in the street looking up at the WTC towers and trying to call home on their cell phones (which were overloaded and not working)
I queued up to use the pay phone, called home and my wife told me that it was a terrorist attack, the Pentagon had been hit as well, I'd better come home quickly.
I continued walking south on Broadway, and heard a noise like a jet plane passing close overhead, then a tremendous BOOM. Everyone in the street screamed and ran, we all thought it was a bombing. This may have been the 2nd plane hitting the second WTC tower. There was a tremendous cloud of smoke and ash filling the air, you could not see or breathe well. It looked like a war zone. Someone said that the towers had collapsed, I thought to myself "that can't be right. those towers can withstand anything." Everyone was running, trying to get the hell out of there.
I ducked into the subway station and tried to get a train uptown, but no trains were running. People were terrified. I thought about catching the Staten Island Ferry to get out of Manhattan, but I decided I'd rather be at home with my wife. I went above ground, started walking east - away from the financial district. Thousands of people were flooding the streets, walking towards Brooklyn and uptown. I spotted an empty cab (!) and got in, picked up another passenger and we managed to get through the crowds to the highway. I got home safely around noon.
We then started calling family and friends, including some of my friends that work in the WTC. Luckily, all of my friends are safe and accounted for. Life is going to go on but I think things are going to be very different in NYC for a long time.
Let's see a successfully mass-marketed x86 PC with Linux preinstalled (and I define "successfully" as "I can go to Best Buy or Circuit City and pick one up"), before we move ahead with a different system architecture...
With a few corporations owning majority control over the major-market radio stations in the US, they're all the same anyway. I can't tell the difference between a "classic rock" station in Boston, Chicago, or anywhere else.
Public radio and noncommercial radio are not affected; some of my favorites on the web:
WZBC-FM Boston College Radio
WNYC-AM National Public Radio - Windows Media Player, sorry.
At 7:49 pm EST I cannot browse or ping www.winehq.com, the WINE project's Corel-hosted webserver.
Coincidence...? Or has Corel just pulled the plug?
see http://www.winecentric.com/
Works great.
Ray Ozzie started Groove in 1997, pre-Napster. Technology like this doesn't get written overnight. Saying that this is "cashing in" on the Napster P2P frenzy is ridiculous.
I'm currently building a multitier web application using Weblogic 5.1 as the application server - EJBs for the business logic and db persistence, and JSP for the presentation layer.
In terms of portability across app servers, most of your problems will be with deployment descriptors (the XML files) and entity bean finder methods. The representation of this data has not been standardized. EJB 2.0 spec will fix this.
I second the comments about entity bean to DB tables - it's difficult to express any but the simplest object-relational mappings. Again, EJB 2.0 promises to fix this and add a lot more, such as mapping Entity beans to arbitrary data sources (LDAP, anyone?)
I received a CueCat free in the mail as a subscriber to Forbes Magazine. If you install the Windows software, you have to go online and agree to an EULA before the software will function. The interesting bits of the EULA are as follows:
- You agree not to reverse engineer the CueCat software or hardware
- You agree that the CueCat is property of Digital Convergence Inc. and may be reposessed at any time.
(I'm paraphrasing the above.)
Now, let's say you never agreed to the EULA. How can you be bound by the above restrictions? I received the CueCat free in the mail WITHOUT ASKING for it.
Digital Convergence is probably banking on the driver developers to fold under pressure. And they may do just that. But I'd love to see them fight it in court.
I used to be a SCSI bigot but I could not justify the difference in price for desktop machines.
A typical example:
Quantum Fireball lct10 20.4GB EIDE, price $99
Quantum Atlas III 18.2GB Ultra Wide SCSI hard disk, price $269
Before someone pulls out the respective spec sheets for each drive and starts quoting MTBF numbers and data transfer rates, let's look at the big picture here:
The average user - heck, even the power user, is not going to see much of a difference between these drives in day-to-day use. Yet the SCSI drive is > 2.5x the price of the EIDE drive.
SCSI is a mature technology. Even EIDE drives use the SCSI command set over the EIDE bus. So WHY do we still see these huge price differences?
Ever see MS-XML formatted documents? Sure, they are conformant XML, but good luck figuring out what to do with their tags:
R E</SOMETAG>
.XML format only solves 10% of the problem, anyway.
.DOC format is well documented. But MS Word's behavior when interpreting .DOC files is NOT documented, and that's the problem. You have to be bug for bug compatible with their implementation of a complex, and somewhat loose, file specification.
<SOMETAG>LOTSOFINCOMPREHENSIBLEMICROSOFTSTUFFHE
Decoding the
As previous topic posters have noted, the
On top of that, you have to implement Visual Basic macros and all the other fun stuff that makes MS Office so "wonderful."
We've got plenty of them already. StarOffice. Lotus SmartSuite. Corel Office. KOffice. Each has its backers.
.doc, .xls, .ppt formats are so strong that most people would rather pay for guaranteed compatibility (and upgrade every 2 years), than use an alternate free product.
But the network effect of standardization on the
Until one can guarantee 100% bug-for-bug compatibility with MS Office - including templates, macro functionality, and UI, and keep up with Microsoft's gratuitous changes every few years, it's dommed to fail.
In my mind a better option would be to improve WINE - it can already run Microsoft Office applications well, and is not far from running them "perfectly." When that happens you will see a lot of folks moving to MS Office on the Linux desktop.
Assume that this could be a potential problem, and assume that a company wants to make sure they are using a "legit" distro. Now, what strategies are currently in place to prevent "rogue" Linux variants from being deployed?
Do RedHat/Debian/SuSe digitally sign their distros, and how easy is it to verify the authenticity of those signatures?
No one has mentioned the best part of the article, this sidebar
mmm.. exploding tvs... gooood...
WINE will drive Linux' acceptance on the desktop in businesses and eventually, homes. It's come a long way - to the point where you can really use it to run commercial (Microsoft!) applications and get useful work done.They deserve the award.
For my money, New York City is a great place for geeks.
- DSL and Cable Modem access is widespread
- Food, Laundry, DVD home delivery 24/7
- restaurants/clubs/etc/etc/etc/etc...
Only problem is, most of the jobs here are in the financial sector (ugh) or Silicon Alley, which values 'creative' types over technical wizards, but that may change as the technical job market expands.
I never liked the cheapie antenna on the Palm VII so I opted for the Handspring Pro instead. Now this looks like a sweet product.
By the way- heard about the new killer app for these things? There is supposed to be a price-comparison webclipping application - while in a store, just enter the product's UPC number and you'll get a list of competitive prices from other stores.
Microsoft will still be distributing their non-compliant Java Virtual Machine with every copy of MSIE and Windows 98 that goes out the door. So you still have the problem of no built-in support for RMI or JNI. Even if Rational changes J++ into a completely standards-compliant development tool, It's the JVM that matters.
support in Notes 4.x was done with a proprietary Win16 emulation layer (similar to WINELIB). I assume that when WINELIB matures it will be a simple matter to link Notes 5.x against WINELIB and build a Linux version.
Will Lotus do this? Only if there is sufficient demand from Linux users!
Disclaimer: I own a bunch of RHAT stock (purchased way above $14 :( ) so take all this with a grain of salt...
;)
Why does RHAT have such a huge valuation? Simple. The total future size of the Linux market is unknown (and therefore, from Wall Street's point of view, close to infinite) - thus justifying virtually any valuation you'd care to put on Red Hat.
We've seen this phenomenon before with Internet stocks. Who knows how big the market for fubar.com will be? So the stock goes through the roof!
But when a market gets some bounds around it, WATCH OUT. A company in a mature market where we have some sense of the ultimate market size will have much lower valuations.
ps: now's a great time to buy more RHAT stock!
I also own a PowerMac 7500 (great machine!) and I've upgraded it several times - first to a 120mhz 604 from Apple, now to a 233mhz G3 from Sonnet Technologies.
:)
Never had a single glitch or compatibility problem with either upgrade. No problems with SCSI or noise. And I do serious work on this machine, five days a week.
Of course, Apple hasn't received a dime of income from me since I bought the 604 board, which is why Steve is anxious to get us oldtimers to upgrade
I've heard that the forthcoming MacOS X *client* OS will not run on the 7500, upgraded or otherwise. This alone may push me to a G4. Sigh...