All that didn't hinder Microsoft to patent f.e. double clicking. The relevant patent number is 6,727,830 and was granted on April 27, 2004.
That's a lousy patent, but it is not a patent on "double clicking" in general, it's a patent on double clicking in devices other than desktop computers. It probably also wouldn't stand if challenged.
But AFAIK the Linux kernel does not contain any GUI code, so you're probably looking at he wrong kind of patents.
I was responding specifically to a comment about scrollbars. Seems to me like you're looking at the wrong kind of patents, not me.
However, the patent would be sufficient to go after any Linux distributors that contain desktop environments like KDE or Gnome.
No, it wouldn't. What you call a "patent on double clicking" is specifically does not apply to KDE or Gnome. Furthermore, it's far from clear that distributors are liable for that kind of patent infringement at all.
These kinds of situations are common in business. If someone keeps making claims like this, you can sue and get a declaratory judgment to end it. In essence, you are saying "if you keep saying that we have done this, let's just go through with the lawsuit you keep threatening and get it over with, whether you want to or not".
Uh, I'm pretty sure scroll bars are patented. Probably not by MS, but by someone. You don't need source code to see them.
I'm pretty sure they aren't. When they were initially created, there were essentially no software patents. And, in any case, they wouldn't be patented by MS, since they were invented before MS (or Apple) ever developed any GUI.
it would also be possible (in theory) to do the reverse of what you suggest and plant small routines from Microsoft code into sections of Linux
Those would be copyright violations, not patent violations. And they are traceable. And they are easily fixable.
Furthermore, if a Microsoft employee contributes code to Linux, it's covered by the GPL and, under GPLv3, patent licenses, so it's neither a copyright nor a patent violation.
Its like the old saying... "All's fair in love and war".. that should be "All's fair in love, war and business"
Well, the saying specifically talks about love and war, not business, because not all is fair in business. Microsoft behaves as if it were, and they can get away with for a while, but not in the long run. If they have planted code in Linux, it will be found out, and the market and the courts will nail them for it, hard.
Microsoft is a closed source company. "Showing the code" is something those open source hippies do; Microsoft would never show code for anything, including patent violations in Linux.
The XML creators have been quite clear on a number of occasions that they never expected people to be writing XML by hand.
This was out of the XML creators' hands, since the basic syntax was created by the SGML designers, and they designed the syntax with the intent that it be easy to use for humans. Of course, they were wrong.
In any case, the fact remains that XML is a lousy language for humans and it's a lousy language for computers.
There are several good and free display capture programs out there, even for Macintosh. So, really, what this guy is being paid for isn't primarily his software but his users' ignorance.
O'Reilly and others suggest that patent holders might use knowledge of prior art to (I'm paraphrasing) "adjust their claims" or "pursue a bogus patent less agressively" or "using failure to find prior art as support of the novelty of an idea".
But all of those don't get at the more serious problem with giving patent trolls like Amazon prior art information: merely listing a reference to prior art on a patent immunizes the patent from prior art claims based on that reference. The presumption is that if the prior art has been listed and the patent got approved, it must be because the examiner checked the reference and found it not to invalidate any of the claims. The presumption is totally wrong, of course, but that doesn't change the legal reality of it.
When someone applies for a bad patent, or has been granted one, do not send them or any public forum legally-relevant prior art information: you are not going to convince them to give up the patent that just cost them tens of thousands of dollars to obtain and that they stand to gain millions from. Instead, patent trolls like Amazon are just going to use any specific information you give them to strengthen their patent.
If you want to complain to them, tell them generically that you believe that there is plenty of prior art for their patent and tell them that you're going to hit them where it hurts: you're not going to buy from them anymore. If you want to give the prior art info to someone, give it to the people being sued.
Well, ESR's experience agrees with mine. And I don't know what it is about the Linux kernel developers that causes them to behave in such a rude manner.
In any case, more relevant than ESR's or Cox's opinion are some statistics. Google query statistics pretty much tell the story here.
If you're getting RSI from XML, you're not doing it right. Use a tool!
So, you're saying that in order to use a markup language whose primary design goal was to be easy for human beings to work with, I should invest in buying and learning at tool? Never mind that I have never even seen a decent XML editor.
Sorry, but XML is just bad design: it's badly designed for machines, and it's badly designed for humans. Using tools to deal with it may be a workaround, but it's certainly not "doing it right".
In fact, the best compromise is probably simply not to write code in XML, but pick one of the better alternative formats and convert to XML after editing.
People may not intuatively understand right from wrong, but they still know what is acceptable and what is not.
Yes, but they may not care about the consequences, or they may not even be able to figure out the consequences, or they may care and understand the consequences but still be unable to control themselves.
We all have the power to change our own lifes, and to alter the course of our lives. That's what seperates humans from animals.
You can perhaps think of the difference between him and you in that he lacks exactly that capacity.
In essence, it makes about as much sense for you to classify someone like him as "bad" as it makes for you to classify a dangerous animal as "bad".
Some people have made a career out of shopping around this idea of "anti-social personality disorder". In fact, all this is is a list of poorly defined terms.
There are probably many different causes for people to become "anti-social" or criminal, some genetic, some learned. Pretending that this is a single disorder that can be diagnosed with a checklist is doing a disservice to everybody.
Frankly, all of science points to the answer being "yes". In fact there are numerous examples of people becoming downright evil from head trauma.
You're right that crime has a strong genetic component. Nevertheless, it's pointless to characterize these people as "bad": if they are genetically incapable of feeling empathy or remorse, they are no more "bad" than a hungry lion. Furthermore, maladaptive as this behavior may be in our society, it's a normal and important variation in biology; after all, many animal are not social animals and will often fight and kill each other on sight, and it's not surprising that that variation also exists among humans.
Why does it matter whether you call these people "bad" or not? Because the question is whether they should be punished or whether our goal should simply be to protect ourselves from them.
I'm torn on whether we should be curing them, or implementing George Carlin's idea and turning the four corner states into a gigantic prison, and just throw them in there.
I don't think a "cure" is possible. Banishment outside civilized society could be an option, but an expensive one and not a very humane one. Another might be electronic monitoring or control. Whatever we do, we should act to minimize suffering, even their suffering.
That doesn't make sense. Cisco had the iPhone trademark before Apple, and Apple knew that. If Apple didn't want Cisco to be able to make demands on them, Apple could simply have called their phone something else and avoided the whole mess.
I think Apple provoked the whole dispute for publicity reasons.
In decmember Cisco suddenly announces a generic VOIP phone named iPhone
And in January, Apple suddenly announces an iPhone cell phone, and Apple still isn't shipping anything.
Seems to me whichever way you look at it, Cisco has priority: they were shipping in 2000, they announced a new product before Apple, and they are shipping before Apple.
Wow, Microsoft has really reached a new low here. They are provoking a patent dispute with AT&T and deliberately trying to lose the case, creating case law that might then be applied to open source.
Microsoft's argument seems carefully crafted to remove the issue of commercial sales vs. open source distribution; that is, that when Microsoft violates AT&T's patent in software they produce and ship it's entirely different from when open source distributions aggregate third party software.
You have to wonder what that company is going to do next... assassinate Linus? Blow up the FSF offices?
Life as we know it alters planetary chemistry and weather in profound ways, ways that are easy to detect if you can do any kind of spectroscopy at all. So, while you cannot reliably detect all forms of life, there are some forms of life that are easy to detect.
I'm afraid we're still going to have to go and look for ourselves if we want a definitive answer to the question of life "out there".
"We" never have to go out there; robotic probes can do everything a human can do, and then some, and they are far cheaper than sending people.
point X may range from 6700 to 6800 units measured from the star, with a range roughly in 100 units. The planet's total value at point X may be 15. Thus, the difference it makes is within regular variability of the star such that the variability overwhelms the planet's contribution.
But that doesn't matter, because you don't subtract absolute values. The shape of the spectrum of the star will remain fairly constant even if its brightness varies over time.
So, if u is the star's spectrum and v is the star+planet spectrum, you might compute
d = v / ||v|| - u / ||u||
As you can see, absolute variations in brightness don't make a difference anymore.
Actually, in practice, people probably use more complicated methods, but you get the idea, I hope.
They're not subtracting absolute amounts. Probably, they are finding the best fit of the star+planet spectrum to the star spectrum and then looking at the remaining differences, and they're averaging that over many observations.
How do you know that Apple didn't try to get an unlocked version? You don't.
I do know exactly that. How? Because Apple doesn't have to ask anybody about producing an unlocked version of a GSM phone, they can simply make one, and it will work with all GSM carriers, domestic and foreign, including Cingular and T-Mobile.
Just face the damned facts: the Apple iPhone is locked only because Apple wants it that way. Jobs isn't working towards freedom from lock-in, he is trying to create lock-in.
Microsoft's chief executive said the company's partnership with Novell, which it signed in November 2006, "demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open-source world."
Does that mean that Ballmer is giving away $240M to anybody who agrees to receive a free license from Microsoft for all their patents? I think that's great value for the open-source world. Where can I sign up?
expect many more models to follow, just as Apple has done with the iPod.
The iPod is still a closed, proprietary platform.
Robust sales will give him the negotiating power he needs to break the back of the carrier cartel
There's no such thing. Carriers are competitive, and many of them support a thriving market of programmable, open phone platforms. Apple apparently wants to take us back to the bad old days in which we only could get locked phones that worked with only one carrier.
Robust sales would give Jobs the negotiating power to do with the iPhone what he already has done with the iPod, and that is definitely not good for the rest of us.
The bad guys here are not the carries, the bad guy here is Jobs and only Jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, Britney Spears has lost control due to a drop in the Red Hat fans
You don't seem to be familiar with a basic principle of statistics: correlation doesn't imply causality.
All that didn't hinder Microsoft to patent f.e. double clicking.
The relevant patent number is 6,727,830 and was granted on April 27, 2004.
That's a lousy patent, but it is not a patent on "double clicking" in general, it's a patent on double clicking in devices other than desktop computers. It probably also wouldn't stand if challenged.
But AFAIK the Linux kernel does not contain any GUI code, so you're
probably looking at he wrong kind of patents.
I was responding specifically to a comment about scrollbars. Seems to me like you're looking at the wrong kind of patents, not me.
However, the patent would be sufficient to go after any Linux distributors
that contain desktop environments like KDE or Gnome.
No, it wouldn't. What you call a "patent on double clicking" is specifically does not apply to KDE or Gnome. Furthermore, it's far from clear that distributors are liable for that kind of patent infringement at all.
Yeah, people who approach design as a series of glib comments and ad-hoc decisions would favor XML, Don.
These kinds of situations are common in business. If someone keeps making claims like this, you can sue and get a declaratory judgment to end it. In essence, you are saying "if you keep saying that we have done this, let's just go through with the lawsuit you keep threatening and get it over with, whether you want to or not".
Uh, I'm pretty sure scroll bars are patented. Probably not by MS, but by someone. You don't need source code to see them.
I'm pretty sure they aren't. When they were initially created, there were essentially no software patents. And, in any case, they wouldn't be patented by MS, since they were invented before MS (or Apple) ever developed any GUI.
it would also be possible (in theory) to do the reverse of what you suggest and plant small routines from Microsoft code into sections of Linux
... "All's fair in love and war" .. that should be "All's fair in love, war and business"
Those would be copyright violations, not patent violations. And they are traceable. And they are easily fixable.
Furthermore, if a Microsoft employee contributes code to Linux, it's covered by the GPL and, under GPLv3, patent licenses, so it's neither a copyright nor a patent violation.
Its like the old saying
Well, the saying specifically talks about love and war, not business, because not all is fair in business. Microsoft behaves as if it were, and they can get away with for a while, but not in the long run. If they have planted code in Linux, it will be found out, and the market and the courts will nail them for it, hard.
Microsoft is a closed source company. "Showing the code" is something those open source hippies do; Microsoft would never show code for anything, including patent violations in Linux.
The XML creators have been quite clear on a number of occasions that they never expected people to be writing XML by hand.
This was out of the XML creators' hands, since the basic syntax was created by the SGML designers, and they designed the syntax with the intent that it be easy to use for humans. Of course, they were wrong.
In any case, the fact remains that XML is a lousy language for humans and it's a lousy language for computers.
There are several good and free display capture programs out there, even for Macintosh. So, really, what this guy is being paid for isn't primarily his software but his users' ignorance.
O'Reilly and others suggest that patent holders might use knowledge of prior art to (I'm paraphrasing) "adjust their claims" or "pursue a bogus patent less agressively" or "using failure to find prior art as support of the novelty of an idea".
But all of those don't get at the more serious problem with giving patent trolls like Amazon prior art information: merely listing a reference to prior art on a patent immunizes the patent from prior art claims based on that reference. The presumption is that if the prior art has been listed and the patent got approved, it must be because the examiner checked the reference and found it not to invalidate any of the claims. The presumption is totally wrong, of course, but that doesn't change the legal reality of it.
When someone applies for a bad patent, or has been granted one, do not send them or any public forum legally-relevant prior art information: you are not going to convince them to give up the patent that just cost them tens of thousands of dollars to obtain and that they stand to gain millions from. Instead, patent trolls like Amazon are just going to use any specific information you give them to strengthen their patent.
If you want to complain to them, tell them generically that you believe that there is plenty of prior art for their patent and tell them that you're going to hit them where it hurts: you're not going to buy from them anymore. If you want to give the prior art info to someone, give it to the people being sued.
Well, ESR's experience agrees with mine. And I don't know what it is about the Linux kernel developers that causes them to behave in such a rude manner.
In any case, more relevant than ESR's or Cox's opinion are some statistics. Google query statistics pretty much tell the story here.
If you're getting RSI from XML, you're not doing it right. Use a tool!
So, you're saying that in order to use a markup language whose primary design goal was to be easy for human beings to work with, I should invest in buying and learning at tool? Never mind that I have never even seen a decent XML editor.
Sorry, but XML is just bad design: it's badly designed for machines, and it's badly designed for humans. Using tools to deal with it may be a workaround, but it's certainly not "doing it right".
In fact, the best compromise is probably simply not to write code in XML, but pick one of the better alternative formats and convert to XML after editing.
People may not intuatively understand right from wrong, but they still know what is acceptable and what is not.
Yes, but they may not care about the consequences, or they may not even be able to figure out the consequences, or they may care and understand the consequences but still be unable to control themselves.
We all have the power to change our own lifes, and to alter the course of our lives. That's what seperates humans from animals.
You can perhaps think of the difference between him and you in that he lacks exactly that capacity.
In essence, it makes about as much sense for you to classify someone like him as "bad" as it makes for you to classify a dangerous animal as "bad".
Some people have made a career out of shopping around this idea of "anti-social personality disorder". In fact, all this is is a list of poorly defined terms.
There are probably many different causes for people to become "anti-social" or criminal, some genetic, some learned. Pretending that this is a single disorder that can be diagnosed with a checklist is doing a disservice to everybody.
Frankly, all of science points to the answer being "yes". In fact there are numerous examples of people becoming downright evil from head trauma.
You're right that crime has a strong genetic component. Nevertheless, it's pointless to characterize these people as "bad": if they are genetically incapable of feeling empathy or remorse, they are no more "bad" than a hungry lion. Furthermore, maladaptive as this behavior may be in our society, it's a normal and important variation in biology; after all, many animal are not social animals and will often fight and kill each other on sight, and it's not surprising that that variation also exists among humans.
Why does it matter whether you call these people "bad" or not? Because the question is whether they should be punished or whether our goal should simply be to protect ourselves from them.
I'm torn on whether we should be curing them, or implementing George Carlin's idea and turning the four corner states into a gigantic prison, and just throw them in there.
I don't think a "cure" is possible. Banishment outside civilized society could be an option, but an expensive one and not a very humane one. Another might be electronic monitoring or control. Whatever we do, we should act to minimize suffering, even their suffering.
That doesn't make sense. Cisco had the iPhone trademark before Apple, and Apple knew that. If Apple didn't want Cisco to be able to make demands on them, Apple could simply have called their phone something else and avoided the whole mess.
I think Apple provoked the whole dispute for publicity reasons.
In decmember Cisco suddenly announces a generic VOIP phone named iPhone
And in January, Apple suddenly announces an iPhone cell phone, and Apple still isn't shipping anything.
Seems to me whichever way you look at it, Cisco has priority: they were shipping in 2000, they announced a new product before Apple, and they are shipping before Apple.
I hope Apple got their butt kicked on this deal.
Wow, Microsoft has really reached a new low here. They are provoking a patent dispute with AT&T and deliberately trying to lose the case, creating case law that might then be applied to open source.
Microsoft's argument seems carefully crafted to remove the issue of commercial sales vs. open source distribution; that is, that when Microsoft violates AT&T's patent in software they produce and ship it's entirely different from when open source distributions aggregate third party software.
You have to wonder what that company is going to do next... assassinate Linus? Blow up the FSF offices?
Life as we know it alters planetary chemistry and weather in profound ways, ways that are easy to detect if you can do any kind of spectroscopy at all. So, while you cannot reliably detect all forms of life, there are some forms of life that are easy to detect.
I'm afraid we're still going to have to go and look for ourselves if we want a definitive answer to the question of life "out there".
"We" never have to go out there; robotic probes can do everything a human can do, and then some, and they are far cheaper than sending people.
point X may range from 6700 to 6800 units measured from the star, with a range roughly in 100 units. The planet's total value at point X may be 15. Thus, the difference it makes is within regular variability of the star such that the variability overwhelms the planet's contribution.
But that doesn't matter, because you don't subtract absolute values. The shape of the spectrum of the star will remain fairly constant even if its brightness varies over time.
So, if u is the star's spectrum and v is the star+planet spectrum, you might compute
d = v / ||v|| - u / ||u||
As you can see, absolute variations in brightness don't make a difference anymore.
Actually, in practice, people probably use more complicated methods, but you get the idea, I hope.
They're not subtracting absolute amounts. Probably, they are finding the best fit of the star+planet spectrum to the star spectrum and then looking at the remaining differences, and they're averaging that over many observations.
How do you know that Apple didn't try to get an unlocked version? You don't.
I do know exactly that. How? Because Apple doesn't have to ask anybody about producing an unlocked version of a GSM phone, they can simply make one, and it will work with all GSM carriers, domestic and foreign, including Cingular and T-Mobile.
Just face the damned facts: the Apple iPhone is locked only because Apple wants it that way. Jobs isn't working towards freedom from lock-in, he is trying to create lock-in.
Microsoft's chief executive said the company's partnership with Novell, which it signed in November 2006, "demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open-source world."
Does that mean that Ballmer is giving away $240M to anybody who agrees to receive a free license from Microsoft for all their patents? I think that's great value for the open-source world. Where can I sign up?
expect many more models to follow, just as Apple has done with the iPod.
The iPod is still a closed, proprietary platform.
Robust sales will give him the negotiating power he needs to break the back of the carrier cartel
There's no such thing. Carriers are competitive, and many of them support a thriving market of programmable, open phone platforms. Apple apparently wants to take us back to the bad old days in which we only could get locked phones that worked with only one carrier.
Robust sales would give Jobs the negotiating power to do with the iPhone what he already has done with the iPod, and that is definitely not good for the rest of us.
The bad guys here are not the carries, the bad guy here is Jobs and only Jobs.
I can't quite figure out why these people think that anybody cares about their lives.